Massachusetts Public Schools Analysis

“Public education is an investment in our future.” Matt Blunt

In this analysis, I looked at the data from the public schools in Massachusetts to determine which schools are struggling the most, which schools had the best math programs and how class size affected college admission.

When I was growing up, I absolutely loved school and learning new things. My family lived in a very small town and moved when I was 10. At our new school, we were supposed to know how to use computers, and we had never been on one. Luckily for my sister and I, we were able to get a tutor and quickly learned what we needed to. We both attended college so I was very interested in finding out what factors influenced college attendance.

1. What I learned

There are 37 schools that have lower than a 50% rate of graduation
Only 4 schools passed the 50% threshold for 4th grade math
College attendance was more dependant on econmic status than class size.

2. The Data

The dataset is included on my Tableau page and consisted of 1861 schools and 953,748 students.

3. Analysis

The first thing that needed to be addressed was figuring out which schools out of the total 1,861 had the lowest graduation rate, as seen below. There were 10 schools with a 100% rate of graduation, compared to the bottom 37 schools that had less than 50% graduation.

I’ve always heard that the class size had a huge impact on student learning. By looking at the next visualization, you can see that economic disadvantage had more impact on their college attendance.

I also looked at 4th grade math levels and determined that there were only 4 schools that had a passing score. This was very surprising to me, and definitely something that needs to be investigated further, as shown below.

4. Conclusion

Schools with a lower than 50% graduation rate need to work on getting more students to graduate - and it’s important to look and see why their rates are so low. Only 4 schools passed the 4th grade math tests, and more attention needs to go into preparing the students. Lastly, I would suggest concentrating more on economically disadvantaged students rather than reducing class sizes as a way to increase college attendance.

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